Verily one day Annie had wandered disconsolately
into the garden, and seated herself on the wooden form in the
summer-house, where in the moonlight she had often nestled in the arms
of her proscribed lover, who was now gone, it might be, for ever.
Objective thought cast her into a reverie, and the reverie brought up
again the images of these objects, till her heart beat with an affection
renewed through a dream. At length she started up, and, wishing to hurry
from a place which seemed filled with images at once lovable and
terrible, she felt her foot caught by an impediment whereby she
stumbled. On looking down she observed some object of a reddish-brown
colour; and becoming alarmed lest it might be one of the toads with
which the place was sometimes invaded, she started back. Yet curiosity
forced her to a closer inspection. She applied her hand to the object,
and brought away one of those very slippers which she had made for
Templeton. All very strange; but what maybe conceived to have been her
feelings when she saw, sticking up from beneath the rushes, the white
skeleton of a foot which had filled that very slipper! A terrible
suspicion shot through her mind.
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